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Everything, Intern, Intern, Intern
I used to really like
Slate
and I used to point it out to friends who were new to the
Internet as an example of the best of the best. I used to read everything and
really enjoyed doing so. Now I am disgusted. In fairness, I am disgusted with
other media outlets, too. It's just that I thought you guys would not run with
the pack so quickly on the Lewinsky scandal.
There is other news going
on. Some of it is pretty darn interesting. We are probably going to have Gulf
War II, and it has every promise of being a hell of a lot nastier, with more
civilian and more military casualties than ever before. We have problems in
Bosnia, Ireland, and the Middle East. Something interesting will probably be
developing around Cuba, too. If it's sex you must talk about, talk about the
pope standing on an island and coming out against birth control (again).
Even if there were no other
news, I just do not care about anyone's sex life this much. If there are other
crimes, they will surely come out in the form of sound evidence, and then there
might be a story.
I look
forward to seeing
Slate
again as a thinking person's media
outlet, for people who have a life and need not read such junk. Get back to
work. You are going to get hair on your palms if you keep this up!
-- Geoffrey
Feldman
Friends
Don't Let Friends Tape Conversations
I'd like to ask Jacob
Weisberg to explain the astonishing remark in his Jan. 26 "Dispatch"
that Linda Tripp's bugging of Monica Lewinsky "is among the worst personal
betrayals I can imagine--much worse, in moral if not in legal terms, than
anything Clinton is accused of doing." Surely Weisberg sees that adultery is
the ultimate personal betrayal: It is the breaking of a vow of permanent sexual
fidelity. For those married by a religious authority, such as Bill Clinton, it
is moreover a betrayal of one's community of faith and one's God. Secretly
taping a friend is bad, but friendship is less serious a relationship than
marriage.
But I
begin to see in the public's indifference to the myriad accusations of
presidential adultery that Weisberg speaks for the majority. Whatever the
reasons for this deplorable twist in public morality, America's loss of its
moral compass is a tragedy even more consequential than Bill Clinton's
adultery.
-- John M. Owen
IV
Mommy
Dearest
In "All the President's
Women," David Plotz lists the women frequently linked to President Clinton
and the qualities they share, he may have omitted something. Many of the
qualities attributed to Clinton's women also describe his mother, Virginia
Kelley.
She was a big-haired
brunette with a fleshy face, full lips, and large teeth. Her clothes were
perhaps not exactly revealing, but flashy nonetheless. She enjoyed music, too,
and above all, she was loyal to him.
Perhaps
Clinton has an Oedipus complex? There could be a Freudian angle to this whole
saga.
-- Liesl
Massaro Fairfax, Va.
Nightmare
in Glen Oaks
M.G.
McCormick of Glen Oaks, N.Y., informs us ("E-Mail to the Editors")
that the Irish Republican Army "always notifies ahead of time when a
bomb will be set off in a civilian area." That's bloody nice of them, isn't it?
But suppose, M.G., that a group with a legitimate grievance against the United
States set off a bomb in a "civilian" area in Glen Oaks. Would you condone such
an action, provided that the group had given prior notification?
-- Tom
Connelly Dumont, N.J.
Impartiality
In "Partial
Truths in the Partial-Birth-Abortion Debate," Atul Gawande attempts to
reduce our natural, profound revulsion at the thought of the procedures used in
abortion to an aesthetic response: All abortions are "grotesque," or "gross."
His own viewpoint might be termed the anaesthetic approach: As long as a fetus
isn't conscious of any pain--isn't, in his terms, a "sensate, aware
creature"--it's OK to kill that fetus. Such reasoning isn't much of a basis for
policy, either. What distinguishes his unconscious fetus from someone under
general anesthesia? Obviously, Gawande is employing other criteria to make that
distinction.
In fact, he follows the same
aesthetic that has worked so well for the so-called pro-choice movement for
decades. It can be summed up in a cliché: out of sight, out of mind. What makes
the focus on partial-birth abortion relevant is not its statistical impact but
the vividness of its picture of the real horrors of abortion. Gawande himself
admits that "as a medical technique, nothing makes partial-birth abortion
fundamentally different from other forms of late-term abortion."
Gawande tries to gloss over
his discomfort--everyone's discomfort--with the cruelty and injustice of
abortion by comparing it to other unpleasant surgical procedures. There is an
obvious difference, however, between amputating a leg and aborting a fetus: The
former will not, left to grow in its normal course, become an independent human
person.
Gawande
admits that "knowing whether we have the technology to keep [the fetus] alive
doesn't answer" the more fundamental question of when a fetus becomes a
conscious being. Medical science cannot now, and perhaps never will be able to,
answer that question. Still less is science competent to pronounce on the
existence of the human soul. It is for these reasons that the rights of the
fetus must be defended as strongly as those of any other person.
-- Darren
Raymond
San Diego
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